Eclipse startup time (Was: questions on PhanTango 'merger' (was Merging Tangobos into Tango)

Don Clugston dac at nospam.com.au
Mon Oct 15 08:38:40 PDT 2007


torhu wrote:
> Don Clugston wrote:
>> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>>> Don Clugston Wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Any idea what's wrong with Eclipse? Why is the startup so 
>>>>> unbelievably slow?
>>>>> Seems to be about 25,000 million clock cycles!
>>>>> (Is this typical of Java apps? It's the almost the only Java app 
>>>>> I've ever used).
>>>>> What on earth is it doing? (Genuine question, not a flame).
>>>>
>>>
>>> What Eclipse version and bundle are you using? Have you installed any 
>>> extra plugins? What is your starting perspective? What is your PC 
>>> specs, and Java VM version?
>>> And what do you mean by "unbelievably slow" ? (Give me a measure in 
>>> seconds :) )
>>
>> 80 seconds on a 1GHz Pentium M laptop. Standard Eclipse C++ download.
>> That's more than 4 times longer than my text editor needed on my 
>> Commodore 64, loaded from an audio cassette tape.
> 
> I've got the CDT download too, plus Descent.  JRE 1.6u1, 1.3 GHz Athlon 
> tbird.  Eclipse starts up and loads an empty D workspace in 23 seconds. 
>  Probably faster if I disable cdt, cvs, etc.  You can try going into 
> help->software updates->manage configuration and disabling everything 
> except platform, rcp, and descent, and see if that helps.
> 
> I've got a relatively fast HD, plus a cpu that's probably a bit faster 
> than yours.  And possibly faster transfer between the cpu and RAM too. I 
> guess eclipse just wasn't made for old laptops.  But once it's done 
> loading, I think it makes up for the wait.  Try pressing ctrl+O, ctrl+1, 
> or ctrl+3.  I'm sorry if you knew this already. :)

Like I said, it wasn't a flame, and in this post I was not particularly seeking 
to improve the startup time on my system. I'm simply astonished that a 
programming community (the Eclipse developers) obviously does not care about 
performance issues _at all_. I had no intuition about what initialization you 
could do that would take such a long time.

> MSVC 6 starts in 2-3 seconds, but has pretty limited D support on the 
> other hand.

There's no question that it's worth piggybacking off an established IDE, 
especially one with excellent support for plugins.



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